William Wordsworth

Spring has been slow in coming to the North Country this year. Snowstorms lingered into the first weeks of May and ice held onto lakes until recently. Winter seemed determined to do its best to cancel spring, yet the birds returned anyway.

One morning this week, we had an Indigo Bunting, a couple pairs of Goldfinches, and a Cardinal at the feeders at the same time. So much color on a gray day is a blessing indeed.

Here is a poem by Wordsworth about spring and birds and so much more.

Enjoy!

Lines Written in Early Spring

A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a Winchester/rifle theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

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“…the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic… The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion…. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.” ~ John Dryden

Selected poems of Dryden

While for the most part it is “easier” to read Romantic and modern poets than “classical” ones, you really cannot say that you understand poetry in any meaningful way until you have read the giants that came before the Romantic period: George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Robert Burns, and John Dryden. Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser are, of course, a given.

A poet is always writing in the shadow of poets who have gone before, and hence, is always writing in reference to them… echoing and examining and extrapolating and expounding on the words and images and sounds of his or her creative “ancestors.” Because in the end, the very language we use as tool and sport were created by the poets who have gone before.

Dryden’s influence on English Poetry is immense: the Heroic Couplet and the Alexandrine form. He influenced and was admired by poets as varied as: Pope, Keats, Byron, Eliot, and Auden.

This is one of my favorite Dryden poems and one that has been on my mind much of late in a year when spring has been reluctant to show its fair face. On a rainy May morning, this poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Song to a Fair Young Lady
Going out of Town in the Spring

How can you not love these lines? True beauty is a blessing and a curse. It is a terrible thing to behold. Poets from Homer onward have known that beauty has the power to ravish, change, and destroy. Beauty is why young men first begin to read poetry and why old men so fiercely refuse to give it up. It is why young women first pick up a pen to write and why old women never forget the songs of their youth.

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some covers with a fedora theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf.

Enjoy!

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some Western covers with a pistol theme that would be hard to leave on a shelf. 

Enjoy!

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Osip Mandelstam is an artistic martyr, a saint of the imagination. No poet sacrificed as much for his art. No poet paid more dearly for believing in the power of language and beauty and the freedom of imagination.

Exiled and incarcerated often in Soviet Russia for what he wrote, Mandelstam reminds us that words do matter. That one of the first casualties of the demonic is beauty and pleasure.

While Mandelstam is probably read and admired by westerners more than any other Russian poet, I still do not think he is read enough.

On a bleak, wet May morning Mandelstam seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

54 (trans. by W.S. Merwin)

Poison in the bread, the air drunk dry.
Hard to doctor the wounds.
Joseph sold into Egypt
grieved no more bitterly for home.

Bedouins under the stars
close their eyes, sitting their horses,
and improvise songs
out of the troubles of the day.

No lack of subject:
one lost a quiver in the sand,
one bartered away a stallion…
the mist of events drift away.

And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.

In these lines I hear echoes of Yeats’s Cuchulain Comforted, “They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.”

Here we have, in the Mandelstam’s own words (rendered beautifully by Merwin), his artistic credo, his faith in the ultimate power of poetry and imagination. And the best explanation for why evil will always try to destroy art.

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A committed… and commit-able…  used-bookstore junkie, I always have my eye out not just for volumes of poetry, but also for old paperbacks with great covers. And though I usually read as much of the paperback books as I am able, it is purely for the sake of the cover art that I pick up the book. And art it is indeed…!

Here are some covers that would be hard to leave on a shelf.

Enjoy!

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some cover art

For the past six weeks I have been re-reading the original six Mike Hammer novels beginning with his second novel, My Gun is Quick. Today I take a look at his very first novel, I, the Jury.

From the beginning of MontanaWriter – over three years ago now– I have tried to think and write about books and poetry here always in the light of Auden’s six characteristics of a critic. (See the introduction to Book Reviews at MonatanaWriter.)

Auden, his prologue to Dyers Hand,  wrote that a critic should:

1. Introduce me to authors or works of art of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

I undertook re-reading and “reviewing” Mickey Spillane for the same reason that I have chosen to write about most of the poems or books that have been reviewed here: because they are works of art worth thinking and writing about.

There is an irony, of course, to quoting Auden in a review of Mickey Spillane. While Auden enjoyed reading mysteries and even wrote one of the best essays ever written about the genre, he clearly doubted the “literary merit” of the books he viewed merely as enjoyable reading for winding down at the end of a day.

Auden was a lover of “cozy” mysteries, the British kind… not the hardboiled American kind. He was most certainly not one of the many millions who made Mickey Spillane the best selling writer in the world.

Yet it needs to be said, while Auden was as great a poet and critic as any in the 20th Century, he was dead wrong in one thing: mysteries can be true literature.

Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane are not merely great genre-writers, they are true artists… certainly some of the most significant literary stylists of the 20th Century.

While Chandler’s literary reputation has grown now over the years, and Ross MacDonald’s to a lesser extent, Spillane remains an artistic pariah… a greatly under-appreciated hardboiled genius.

In  a five year period between 1947 and 1952, Mickey Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels:

• I, the Jury (1947)
• My Gun is Quick (1950)
• Vengeance is Mine! (1950)
• One Lonely Night (1951)
• The Big Kill (1951)
• Kiss Me, Deadly (1952)

Based on a character that Spillane had in mind for a comic book, Mike Hammer and Mike Hammer’s voice must have been inhabiting the dark streets of Spillane’s imagination for some time before he finally sat down in front of his Smith-Corona Super-Speed and cranked out this pulp classic.

While I, The Jury was written in just 19 days, it is clear in the opening sentences of the book that the fully-formed character of Mike Hammer that comes into the room shaking rain off of his hat is already a force of nature, one of the great literary archetypes to ever step out of the pages of a book and into the world. In language and tone, writer and detective hit us hard immediately like a punch in the gut.

Returning now to I, The Jury after having spent the last month and a half reading the other five initial Hammer books made me appreciate this literary classic all the more.

Here are the opening lines of I, the Jury.

Enjoy!

The opening paragraphs of I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane

 

I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.

“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said. In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”

[Spillane, Mickey (2001-06-01). The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume I: 1 (p. 5). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.]

 

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Yet another April blizzard descended yesterday on the North Country. According to calendars and the returning birds, spring has arrived. But we know it only as a rumor. Shove-able snow is not the work of spring.

It has been awhile since I have done a poetry review at MontanaWriter. I continue daily to read and write and think about poetry and language. The long winter has had me returning to the comfort of poets and poems that I am most familiar with. Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Here is a poem about spring as spring is suppose to be by Hopkins.

Enjoy!

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens

 

A Hopkins’ line is like no other… alliterative, difficult, and ethereal. In fact, to quote these lines, a Hopkins’ line is, “long and lovely and lush.”

Poetry is the closest thing we have to magic language, the language we use to summon spirits and gods and God himself. Hopkins the priest knew this as well as any poet. His long, lovely, and lush lines are born in his superb understanding of this reality. It is why I so often find myself returning to his poetry.

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Spillane’s 6th novel

In a five year period, from 1947 to 1952 Mickey Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels. In that time period he became the biggest selling writer in the world. After completing his 6th Mike Hammer novel, Kiss Me Deadly, in 1952 he stopped writing anything for nine years except for a few hard-boiled short stories that were published by friends of his who edited some popular men’s magazines of the day.

During his nine-year hiatus he worked in a circus, on movie projects, and even as an actor. Spillane became a relative literary recluse, though not at all a cultural one.

There is much speculation that Spillane was more hurt by the moral and artistic storm of criticism his work engendered than he would ever let on. Only deep psychological distress in the end could possibly explain something as inexplicable as Spillane’s bizarre conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness religion during this period. It is as if Hugh Hefner suddenly decided to become Mormon.

This past week I reread Kiss Me Deadly, Spillane’s 6th and final novel of his “Golden Period.” Another Spillane novel I had not read for more than a decade and a half, it holds up well. It is Mickey Spillane after all.

Yet there are clear signs that Spillane and his fictional character are tiring. There is a “spark” that seems to be missing, or more appropriately for Spillane and Hammer, less rage to the fire. Detective and writer can no longer keep up the pace they have set. Between moments of brilliance, there are also lesser moments when both Hammer and Spillane seem to be just going through familiar motions. Not breaking new hard-boiled ground so much as rehearsing steps they both know by heart… dames and damage all too familiar.

Next week I will review I, The Jury… the novel that began everything. In the meantime, here are a few paragraphs of great lines from Chapter One of Kiss Me Deadly. As these lines show, Spillane can still write the hell out it when the artistic passion is there.

Enjoy!

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